This blog on Texas education contains posts on accountability, testing, college readiness, dropouts, bilingual education, immigration, school finance, race, class, and gender issues with additional focus at the national level.

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Sunday, September 30, 2012

Consider
the benefits: "The top 10% law, recently amended to admit the top 8%
of graduates, has not only boosted diversity, but it has also brought
other benefits. Since the mid-1990s,
the graduation rate at UT-Austin has risen steadily. Studies showed the
graduates admitted under the law outperformed others with higher SAT
scores."

AUSTIN, Texas — After a U.S.
appeals court struck down race-based college admissions in Texas 16
years ago, the first Mexican American woman elected to the state
Legislature proposed a simple change that transformed education in the
state.

Rep. Irma Rangel said all students who graduated in the top
10% of their high school class should win admission to the state's
colleges, including the highly regarded University of Texas. Her bill, signed into law by then-Gov. George W. Bush,
opened the door to higher education for Mexican American students from
the Rio Grande Valley, for black students from Dallas and Houston and
for rural white students.

It also changed the University of Texas
at Austin. Last year, 36% of those admitted under this policy were
Latino or black, double the percentage of "underrepresented minorities"
in 1996, the year affirmative action was struck down.

But the university chafed at
the "top 10%" law and said its success relied on continuing segregation
in many high schools. Left out too were many talented minority students
from integrated, highly competitive high schools.

So when the
Supreme Court ruled in 2003 that universities may consider a minority
student's race as a "plus factor" in admissions, UT officials added a
new affirmative action policy to go along with the automatic admission
rule. For these new students — about one-fourth of the freshman class —
their race may play a role in who is admitted.

The effect of the
new policy has been modest. Nine in 10 of the Latino and black students
admitted to UT in the last two years came as "automatic admits," not as
beneficiaries of affirmative action.
Nonetheless, UT's lawyers
must now defend their race-based admission policy before a more
conservative Supreme Court, which will revisit the issue thanks to
Abigail Fisher, a white student from Sugar Land, Texas. She was turned
down by the university in 2008 and says she was a victim of illegal race
discrimination.

The case poses a new question for the court,
which will hear arguments next month. Can affirmative action be
justified if a university is achieving diversity without using race? The
answer could determine the future of affirmative action in college
admissions in much of the nation.
The top 10% law, recently
amended to admit the top 8% of graduates, has not only boosted
diversity, but it has also brought other benefits. Since the mid-1990s,
the graduation rate at UT-Austin has risen steadily. Studies showed the
graduates admitted under the law outperformed others with higher SAT
scores.

"It's had a profound impact. Before, about 10% of the high
schools filled 75% of the freshman class seats here," said law
professor Gerald Torres. Two years ago, the campus announced that for
the first time, a majority of its freshmen were minorities: Latinos,
Asians or blacks.
And nearly all these new students earned admission solely because of their academic performance.
But
because the top 10% law drove admissions, university officials said
they would prefer more freedom to select students who were extraordinary
or special. For example, a student with high SAT scores who wants to
major in architecture, science or music may deserve admission, even if
that student did not graduate at the top of the class, they said.

The university also says it wants to make room for minority students who did well in integrated high schools.

"The
racial diversity [arising from automatic admission] is mostly a product
of the fact that Texas high schools remain highly segregated,"
university lawyers told the justices in briefs. Further, "the African
American or Hispanic child of successful professionals in Dallas" who is
not a top-tier graduate may be a better candidate for admission than a
top graduate of a less-demanding high school with an "overwhelmingly
Hispanic" or "overwhelming African American student body," they said.
The
Texas case is being closely watched by higher education leaders
nationwide, many of whom worry the court is ready to strike down or
scale back affirmative action.

Since the court upheld affirmative action at the University of Michigan, the author of that 5-4 decision, Justice Sandra Day O'Connor, has retired and been replaced by the more conservative Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr. He and three other conservatives are likely to vote against use of "race conscious" admissions.
All eyes are again on Justice Anthony M. Kennedy,
a centrist who has consistently opposed policies that rely on race.
Dissenting in the Michigan case, he said the court should force
"educational institutions to seriously explore race-neutral
alternatives," such as the top 10% law in Texas.
Experts on higher education differ on whether a Texas-style automatic admissions law would work elsewhere.

Florida
and California have used such policies to increase diversity after
their affirmative action plans were halted in the 1990s. The results
have been mixed.

In California, students who graduate in the top
9% of their high school class are admitted to the University of
California system, but not necessarily to the campus of their choice. UC
officials also give extra consideration to students who faced social
and economic hardships.

The percentage of Latino students at UC
has been rising steadily, but officials attribute this mostly to the
surge in the Latino population. Despite their best efforts, they say, UC Berkeley and UCLA have fewer black students than in 1996.

UC
President Mark G. Yudof was formerly the chancellor at the University
of Texas. The automatic admissions policy "works well in Texas, but not
so well in California," he said, because Texas has more segregated
schools. UC's lawyers told the high court they had tried race-neutral
policies, but achieved "limited and disappointing results."

But
Edward Blum, an activist against affirmative action who launched
Fisher's suit, believes the success of UT's automatic admissions policy
will show the Supreme Court that race-based policies are no longer
needed.

"Using a student's race to give him an advantage or
disadvantage strikes most Americans as wrong," he said. "They are
creating more diversity through the top 10% policy, and every black and
Hispanic student can say, 'My race was not a factor in my admission.'"

In this day and age, we need to make a college education a new baseline rather than just a high school diploma. And assuming that our schools are well funded and that children have access to quality teaching, ALL children are capable of learning the 4x4 curriculum that helps make them college ready.

Commissioner Pauken heads the Texas Workforce Commission and Bill Hammond is President and. Chief Executive Officer of Texas Association of Business & Chambers of Commerce and has been to date highly influential in holding the line on Texas-style accountability. For example, check out this earlier piece: http://www.txbiz.org/wcnews/NewsArticleDisplay.aspx?articleid=52-Angela

Tom Pauken responds to Bill Hammond on the subject of school accountability.

Hammond encourages us to “stay the course” of the existing high-stakes testing system and “4×4” curriculum that have come to dominate public education in Texas. Implicit in this expensive testing system (the cost to Texas taxpayers is an estimated $450 million over a five-year period) and the 4×4 curriculum is the idea that everyone should be prepared to go to a four-year university. I call it the “one-size-fits-all” approach to education, which doesn’t acknowledge that students have different talents and interests. The current system clearly isn’t working all that well to prepare students to be “college ready.” And it is doing a particularly poor job for those students who would benefit from a greater emphasis on career and technical education at the high school level.

So why should we “stay the course” of an overly prescriptive curriculum and a high-stakes testing system that haven’t delivered on its promises since they were first put in place in the mid-1990s? Rather than acknowledging that this state-mandated system isn’t working, the response from the defenders of the status quo is to roll out a new test, make a few changes to the accountability system and promise everything will be better if we just give it a chance to work. That’s what they said when TAAS became TAKS, and that’s what they are saying now that TAKS is becoming STAAR.

What can we do to inject some common sense into the discussion on education policy? We need multiple pathways to a high school diploma — pathways that reflect student goals. Every student should get the basics. Then, for those students wanting to go on to a university, there would be a college preparatory curriculum with emphasis on math and science, or one that focuses on humanities and the fine arts. There would be a career-oriented curriculum for students so inclined which would prepare them with an industry-certified license or credential by the time they graduate from high school.

I fully support holding schools accountable. But the current system does not hold schools accountable for successfully educating and preparing students; rather, it makes them beholden to performance on a single test. Success and accountability can be measured in a variety of ways.

Pauken’s piece is a response to one that Hammond wrote, which may or may not have been in response to a column by Patti Hart, which continues a debate that flared up after Hammond and the Texas Association of Business threatened to take school finance hostage if they didn’t get their way. As I’ve said before, I agree with Pauken, and I’m not really sure why this is even controversial. But apparently this is how we do things these days.

Shortly
after the announcement that the school would open, Avenues received
more than 5,000 applications from teachers all over the world, Mr.
Whittle said. With salaries hovering around $110,000 (well above the
average pay scale for a teacher in New York City), 120 teachers began
this fall.

More than 776 school boards, covering 85 percent of the students in
the state, have passed resolutions calling for a more nuanced, less
punitive approach to student and school assessment in the last few
months. And that’s after the state began rolling out the
new-and-improved testing system known as STAAR.

During its last session, the Texas Legislature faced an angry mob
that railed, in vain, against a budget that cut billions from public
education. A whole new mob, even more pissed-off than the last, is
forming around the issue of over-testing, and could force lawmakers to
make some testing and accountability reforms.

There are some serious differences of opinion, even among folks who
agree the system needs to change. Last night on the University of Texas
campus, five such leaders got together to share their ideas—a
preview of the arguments we’re likely to see next legislative session. A
few hundred teachers, activists, students and legislators turned up for
the panel, which was hosted by the Lyndon B. Johnson School of Public
Affairs.

To begin, a pair of university researchers simply called for an end
to the high-stakes system we have today, in which students’ test scores
are used as the basis for judging schools and teachers. Angela
Valenzuela, a UT professor of cultural studies in education, said it’s a
battle she’s been fighting for more than a decade in Texas, because the
pressure to test well—at the expense of a well-rounded education—falls
disproportionately on Hispanic and black students.

Rice University’s Linda McNeil, a critical writer about standardized
testing’s effects on schools, really brought the heat, calling out the
“big money interests” profiting off the way we run our schools. With
statistics she said came from a legislative staffer, she offered a chart
that said Texas spent $39 million on testing in the 2000-2001 school
year, but will spend $93 million on it this year. “Public tax dollars
need to go with public education. You have a lot of people seeing
education tax dollars as their opportunity to get rich,” she said.

Texas Workforce Commissioner Tom Pauken has been an omnipresent advocate
for career and technical training, which he says Texas has neglected in
its zeal to boost college graduation rates. Monday night, Pauken called
the current system a “trap” for kids whose ambitions don’t include
college. “We’ve almost denigrated the value of working with one’s
hands,” he said. Pauken warned of looming shortages in practical trades.
“The average age of a master plumber,” he remarked, “is 56.”

David Anthony, from the education group Raise Your Hand Texas, said,
like Pauken, that he’s supported bills to create “multiple pathways” to
graduation in the past, and his group plans to do so again next January.
“There is honor and quality of life in all work. Not just work that
uses math and science,” Anthony said. “Texas is selling our students a
dream that is not based in current reality.”As evidence, Anthony quoted a pretty damning statistic from this
first year of STAAR testing—that of the students who failed their STAAR
tests last year and took remedial classes over the summer, just 20
percent passed their retakes. “You tell me which path those kids are
on,” he said. “They’re already behind on their exams and they’ve only
got 13 more to go.”

Todd Williams, education adviser to Dallas mayor Mike Rawlings and
founder of a school reform group, Commit!, said he sees a particular
problem in the way STAAR and TAKS scores are sliced to fit the needs of
districts or the Texas Education Agency, and how hard it is to get
meaningful test data. Parents might be heartened to hear their kid
passed a state test, then be shocked to find out her “passing” score was
under 50 percent. Of the 8,000 schools in Texas, he said, 93 percent of
them were rated “acceptable” or higher by the state.

State Rep. Jimmie Don Aycock, a Killeen Republican who has a good
shot at chairing the House Public Education Committee next session,
struck a broad, conciliatory tone. He said he doesn’t think it makes
sense to judge students, teachers and schools by a single test, but he
asked for people to share specific ideas about, say, how to save money
on testing. He said his mind was open, and that he’s focused on making positive change,
with concrete ideas that can survive in the Capitol. Perhaps without
meaning to bring down the party, Aycock underscored why the most likely
outcome is no change at all, or very little.

“Simply saying ‘I don’t like what we’re doing’ doesn’t give us a bill,” he said.

Thousands of public school teachers march on streets surrounding the
Chicago Public Schools district headquarters on the first day of strike
action over teachers' contracts on Monday, September 10, 2012, in
Chicago. For the first time in a quarter-century, Chicago teachers
walked out of the classroom Monday, taking a bitter contract dispute
over evaluations and job security to the streets of the nation's
third-largest city—and to a national audience—less than a week after
most schools opened for fall. (AP Photo/Sitthixay Ditthavong)

Even though the Chicago teachers’ strike is now settled, the issues it
raised will not go away anytime soon. Many of the reforms the teachers
oppose—expanding charter schools, using test scores to evaluate
teachers, closing “failing” schools—were introduced by then–Chicago
Schools CEO Arne Duncan, now President Obama’s education secretary. In
fact, these measures have largely been incorporated into federal policy
under Obama’s Race to the Top (RTT) initiative.

Obama frequently touts RTT on the campaign trail along with what he
regards as his administration’s other signal accomplishments in
education policy: national common core standards adopted by forty-six
states, the provisionally enacted Dream Act and more. The president has
raised education as a campaign issue because he knows the American
people are deeply concerned about it. The cutbacks in the wake of the
recession have taken a heavy toll on schools. Thousands of teachers and
other personnel have been laid off, class sizes have increased and
critical programs—kindergarten, music, art, after-school programs,
etc.—have been slashed or even eliminated.

Obama deserves credit for allowing states to use stimulus funds to
offset some of the effects of austerity, saving more than 400,000 jobs
in education. However, his education policy has all along had two major
weaknesses: his stance toward teachers and his unwillingness to
acknowledge that the biggest challenge confronting public schools is
poverty. What has happened in Chicago exemplifies those weaknesses.

The district has been undergoing reforms consistent with Obama’s
accountability agenda for several years now. But only 45 percent of
Chicago public school students meet or exceed the Illinois learning
standards. The city’s schools have some of the highest dropout rates in
the nation. In 2011–12, of the 598 schools in the system, 443 did not
achieve Average Yearly Progress for the second consecutive year.

Clearly, something is not working in Chicago. It’s not just the
reform agenda that’s at fault: the schools have been failing for a long
time. Mayor Rahm Emanuel may be a bully and a threat to public
education—and his remedies the wrong ones—but the call for change can’t
be denied.
The teachers have been bold in their denunciation of the high-stakes
testing that has been used to rank students, schools and now teachers.
But they have been less clear about what should be done to promote
change and improvement. The union has raised the critical issue of
student poverty by calling for more social workers and school-based
clinics, but it has not acknowledged that more learning time and a clear
and fair basis for judging teacher effectiveness are issues that must
be addressed.

President Obama, the teachers unions and all the other reformers out
there would do well to focus more attention on the three huge
interrelated issues that pose the biggest challenge to public education
and to American society. These are complex issues that will not be
resolved by any union contract settlement—but they cannot be avoided if
we are to fix what ails our public schools. The big three are:

§Youth poverty. Since 2008, poverty rates
for children have soared. Nationally, one child in four comes from a
family below the poverty line, and one in five lives in a state of food
emergency. Increasingly, public schools are all that remains of the
safety net for poor children, and with funding for education being cut
back, the safety net is falling apart.

§Changing demographics. In nine states,
the majority of school-age children are from minority backgrounds.
Because of higher birth rates among Latinos, the number of states with
majority minority populations will steadily increase even if the influx
of immigrants continues to slow. As the ethnic composition of student
populations changes, it is harder to obtain public support for school
funding. Voters don’t seem to understand that today’s children will be
responsible for supporting an aging, largely white population during its
retirement years. Economists project that it takes at least three
workers to support one retiree on Social Security. Since 2010 we have
fallen below that threshold. Will a less educated, poorer, multiracial
workforce be willing or able to take care of an aging white population?

§Growing segregation. According to UCLA’s
Civil Rights Project, two in every five African-American and Latino
students attend highly segregated schools. Schools are more segregated
today than they were forty years ago. The pattern is most severe in
Western states, including California—not in the South, as many people
believe—and most nonwhite schools are segregated by poverty as well.
Dropout rates and failure tend to be highest in the schools of poor
children. How will the next generation of young people be prepared to
solve the problems they inherit?

The Chicago teachers deserve credit for challenging the neoliberal
reforms and the drive toward privatization that have been promoted by
Mayor Emanuel, Secretary Duncan and, to some extent, President Obama.
However, shutting down a school system where the overwhelming majority
of students are poor, black and Latino without offering a vision for
comprehensive change is not sufficient. Parents have called for a seat
at the negotiating table. Perhaps that will be what it takes to create
schools that are accountable to those they serve.

Friday, September 21, 2012

Concerning news about U.S. whites lacking a high school diploma. It's one thing to not improve at the same rate as other groups but quite another to see a reverse trend. Quote from within:

The reasons for the decline remain unclear, but researchers offered
possible explanations, including a spike in prescription drug overdoses
among young whites, higher rates of smoking among less educated white women, rising obesity, and a steady increase in the number of the least educated Americans who lack health insurance.

White men lacking a high school diploma lost three years of life. Life
expectancy for both blacks and Hispanics of the same education level
rose, the data showed. But blacks over all do not live as long as
whites, while Hispanics live longer than both whites and blacks.

Some researchers say that the results may be overstated because there are actually fewer whites without high school diplomas today, down from 12 to 22 percent in 1990. The researcher, Professor Olshansky does not refute this but says:

the
magnitude of the drop in life expectancy was still a measure of
deterioration. “The good news is that there are fewer people in this
group,” he said. “The bad news is that those who are in it are dying
more quickly.”

I wonder about the Hispanic subgroup and suspect is this were further analyzed by generational status or length of recency in this country if we would see U.S.-born Latinos/Mexicans as similar to poor whites or blacks since cultural assimilation, among other things, also means assimilating to behaviors that can compromise their health. A number of researchers, including UCLA's David Hayes Bautista has documented this in the area of health. Falls under what today is referred to as "the Latino Paradox" which is not really so much a paradox but reflective of the diverse generational/acculturational composition of the Latino population.

Finally, this argues for the merits of universally accessible health care and higher educational opportunities that the middle- and upper-classes, particularly whites, have enjoyed to a much greater extent if we are to improve the health of our nation.-Angela

September 20, 2012

Life Expectancy Shrinks for Less-Educated Whites in U.S.

For generations of Americans, it was a given that children would live
longer than their parents. But there is now mounting evidence that this
enduring trend has reversed itself for the country’s least-educated
whites, an increasingly troubled group whose life expectancy has fallen
by four years since 1990.

Researchers have long documented that the most educated Americans were
making the biggest gains in life expectancy, but now they say mortality
data show that life spans for some of the least educated Americans are
actually contracting. Four studies in recent years identified modest
declines, but a new one that looks separately at Americans lacking a
high school diploma found disturbingly sharp drops in life expectancy
for whites in this group. Experts not involved in the new research said
its findings were persuasive.

The reasons for the decline remain unclear, but researchers offered
possible explanations, including a spike in prescription drug overdoses
among young whites, higher rates of smoking among less educated white women, rising obesity, and a steady increase in the number of the least educated Americans who lack health insurance.

The steepest declines were for white women without a high school
diploma, who lost five years of life between 1990 and 2008, said S. Jay
Olshansky, a public health professor at the University of Illinois at
Chicago and the lead investigator on the study, published last month
in Health Affairs. By 2008, life expectancy for black women without a
high school diploma had surpassed that of white women of the same
education level, the study found.

White men lacking a high school diploma lost three years of life. Life
expectancy for both blacks and Hispanics of the same education level
rose, the data showed. But blacks over all do not live as long as
whites, while Hispanics live longer than both whites and blacks.

“We’re used to looking at groups and complaining that their mortality
rates haven’t improved fast enough, but to actually go backward is
deeply troubling,” said John G. Haaga, head of the Population and Social
Processes Branch of the National Institute on Aging, who was not
involved in the new study.

The five-year decline for white women rivals the catastrophic seven-year
drop for Russian men in the years after the collapse of the Soviet
Union, said Michael Marmot, director of the Institute of Health Equity
in London.

The decline among the least educated non-Hispanic whites, who make up a
shrinking share of the population, widened an already troubling gap. The
latest estimate shows life expectancy for white women without a high
school diploma was 73.5 years, compared with 83.9 years for white women
with a college degree or more. For white men, the gap was even bigger:
67.5 years for the least educated white men compared with 80.4 for those
with a college degree or better.

The dropping life expectancies have helped weigh down the United States
in international life expectancy rankings, particularly for women. In
2010, American women fell to 41st place, down from 14th place in 1985,
in the United Nations rankings. Among developed countries, American
women sank from the middle of the pack in 1970 to last place in 2010,
according to the Human Mortality Database.

The slump is so vexing that it became the subject of an inquiry by the
National Academy of Sciences, which published a report on it last year.

“There’s this enormous issue of why,” said David Cutler, an economics
professor at Harvard who was an author of a 2008 paper that found modest
declines in life expectancy for less educated white women from 1981 to
2000. “It’s very puzzling and we don’t have a great explanation.”

And it is yet another sign of distress in one of the country’s most
vulnerable groups during a period when major social changes are
transforming life for less educated whites. Childbirth outside marriage
has soared, increasing pressures on women who are more likely to be
single parents. Those who do marry tend to choose mates with similar
education levels, concentrating the disadvantage.

Inklings of this decline have been accumulating since 2008. Professor
Cutler’s paper, published in Health Affairs, found a decline in life
expectancy of about a year for less educated white women from 1990 to
2000. Three other studies, by Ahmedin Jemal, a researcher at the
American Cancer Society; Jennifer Karas Montez, a Robert Wood Johnson
Foundation Health and Society Scholar at Harvard; and Richard Miech, a
professor at the University of Colorado Denver, found increases in
mortality rates (the ratio of deaths to a population) for the least
educated Americans.

Professor Olshansky’s study, financed by the MacArthur Foundation
Research Network on an Aging Society, found by far the biggest decline
in life expectancy for the least educated non-Hispanic whites, in large
part because he isolated those without a high school diploma, a group
usually combined with high school graduates. Non-Hispanic whites
currently make up 63 percent of the population of the United States.

Researchers said they were baffled by the magnitude of the drop. Some
cautioned that the results could be overstated because Americans without
a high school diploma — about 12 percent of the population, down from
about 22 percent in 1990, according to the Census Bureau — were a
shrinking group that was now more likely to be disadvantaged in ways
besides education, compared with past generations.

Professor Olshansky agreed that the group was now smaller, but said the
magnitude of the drop in life expectancy was still a measure of
deterioration. “The good news is that there are fewer people in this
group,” he said. “The bad news is that those who are in it are dying
more quickly.”

Researchers, including some involved in the earlier studies that found
more modest declines in life expectancy, said that Professor Olshansky’s
methodology was sound and that the findings reinforced evidence of a
troubling pattern that has emerged for those at the bottom of the
education ladder, particularly white women.

“Something is going on in the lives of disadvantaged white women that is
leading to some really alarming trends in life expectancy,” said Ms.
Montez of Harvard.

Researchers offered theories for the drop in life expectancy, but cautioned that none could fully explain it.

James Jackson, director of the Institute of Social Research at the
University of Michigan and an author of the new study, said white women
with low levels of education may exhibit more risky behavior than that
of previous generations.

Overdoses from prescription drugs have spiked since 1990,
disproportionately affecting whites, particularly women. Professor
Miech, of the University of Colorado, noted the rise in a 2011 paper in
the American Sociological Review, arguing that it was among the biggest
changes for whites in recent decades and that it appeared to have offset
gains for less educated people in the rate of heart attacks.

Ms. Montez, who studies women’s health, said that smoking was a big part
of declines in life expectancy for less educated women. Smoking rates
have increased among women without a high school diploma, both white and
black, she said. But for men of the same education level, they have
declined.

This group also has less access to health care than before. The share of
working-age adults with less than a high school diploma who did not
have health insurance rose to 43 percent in 2006, up from 35 percent in
1993, according to Mr. Jemal at the American Cancer Society. Just 10
percent of those with a college degree were uninsured last year, the
Census Bureau reported.

The shift should be seen against the backdrop of sweeping changes in the
American economy and in women’s lives, said Lisa Berkman, director of
the Harvard Center for Population and Development Studies. The
overwhelming majority of women now work, while fertility has remained
higher than in European countries. For women in low-wage jobs, which are
often less flexible, this could take a toll on health, a topic
that Professor Berkman has a grant from the National Institute on Aging
to study.

In an op-ed in Sunday's Wall Street Journal, News Corp. executive vice president Joel Klein attacked the ongoing
teachers' strike in Chicago without disclosing his role in
administering $4.7 million in educational testing contracts at the heart
of the dispute.

In 2010, News Corp. purchased
90 percent of the education technology company Wireless Generation for
$360 million, incorporating that company into the education subsidiary
of News Corp. now known as Amplify.

Klein, the former schools chancellor for New York City, was hired by Rupert Murdoch to run News Corp.'s education division in July of 2010 and is now the CEO of Amplify. While the Journal
-- which is also owned by News Corp. -- identified Klein as Amplify's
CEO, neither the paper nor Klein himself disclosed that the company has
millions of dollars in contracts for the very testing that is a central
issue in the strike.

In May, Chicago Public Schools entered into an agreement with
Wireless Generation to provide "math assessment services" and "literacy
assessment services" to the school district. The math agreement is for "a total cost not to exceed $1,700,000" while the literacy assessment cites a cost "not to exceed $3,000,000." The Progressive Change Campaign Committee first reported on these contracts in a September 12 blog post.

In his op-ed, Klein downplays the teachers' rationale for taking
action, writing that the strike "feels more about attitude -- 'the mayor
doesn't respect us' -- than substance." In fact, the Chicago Teachers
Union objects to a reformulation
of the existing teacher evaluation system which would make standardized
tests -- like those administered by Wireless Generation -- count for 40
percent of the score, which will be used to determine teacher pay and
whether certain teachers will be laid off.
Union president Karen Lewis said
the tests are "no way to measure the effectiveness of an educator" and
that "there are too many factors beyond our control which impact how
well some students perform on standardized tests such as poverty,
exposure to violence, homelessness, hunger and other social issues
beyond our control." The union is seeking such scores to weigh less
heavily on the teachers' evaluations.

Indeed, reporting in the Journalhas highlighted
the centrality of teacher evaluations based on standardized testing to
the ongoing dispute between teachers and the city. In a September 10
article the Journal noted that the strike has highlighted "a
growing national debate over how best to evaluate teachers, set their
pay and fire them."

In previous news stories discussing education reform, the Journal has disclosed its financial connection to News Corp. and Wireless Generation. In a May story on education standards, the Journal
wrote about "Wireless Generation, an education-technology company owned
by News Corp., which also owns The Wall Street Journal." In a January story
on the "Race to the Top" education program, they made a similar
disclosure. But the paper has not disclosed the contracts with Chicago
Public Schools in their coverage of the strike.

Wireless Generation has previously been the target of controversy linked to its News Corp. ownership. In 2011, New York City rejected
a $27 million contract with Wireless Generation, specifically citing
the ongoing criminal investigation into phone hacking by their parent
company. State Controller Thomas DiNapoli wrote, "in light of the
significant ongoing investigations and continuing revelations with
respect to News Corp., we are returning the contract with Wireless
Generation unapproved."

From TASA.net, the website for the Texas Association of School Administrators. Imagine this. As of today, 793 districts in Texas out of 1,265 total in the state have adopted resolutions against high-stakes testing. Remember that in 1999, we had a whole federal court trial over this. Sure, the legislature over-reached in the context of HB 3 passed in 2009, but we already had a crisis—particularly impacting children of color well over a decade ago. So this is long overdue and much welcomed, but let's own up to the fact that our community missed the boat by a long shot when so much was being done so much earlier (pre-NCLB) to address and counter what many of us already knew way back then was playing out in our children's classrooms and how they were being harmed by it. Powerful interests—including those within the public at large—are and have been at play here.-Angela

Adopted Board Resolutions

The following is a list of school districts that have adopted a version of the Resolution Concerning High Stakes, Standardized Testing of Texas Public School Students. As of September 20, 2012, 793 districts representing more than 4.2 million students
have notified us they've adopted the resolution. That's 77 percent of
Texas school districts and 86 percent of all Texas public school
students. The number following the district name is the ESC region
number. Though individual districts may have made some modifications to
the specific wording of the document TASA provided, the spirit of the
resolution remained intact.

The report showed that segregation is not limited to race: blacks and
Latinos are twice as likely as white or Asian students to attend schools
with a substantial majority of poor children.

Across the country, 43 percent of Latinos and 38 percent of blacks
attend schools where fewer than 10 percent of their classmates are
white, according to the report, released on Wednesday by the Civil
Rights Project at the University of California, Los Angeles.

And more than one in seven black and Latino students attend schools
where fewer than 1 percent of their classmates are white, according to
the group’s analysis of enrollment data from 2009-2010, the latest year
for which federal statistics are available.

Segregation of Latino students is most pronounced in California, New
York and Texas. The most segregated cities for blacks include Atlanta,
Chicago, Detroit, Houston, Philadelphia and Washington.

“Extreme segregation is becoming more common,” said Gary Orfield, an
author of the report who is co-director of the Civil Rights Project.

The overlap between schools with high minority populations and those
with high levels of poverty was significant. According to the report,
the typical black or Latino student attends a school where almost two
out of every three classmates come from low-income families. Mr. Orfield
said that schools with mostly minority and poor students were likely to
have fewer resources, less assertive parent groups and less experienced
teachers.

The issue of segregation hovers over many discussions about the future of education.

Some education advocates say that policies being introduced across the
nation about how teachers should granted tenure or fired as well as how
they should be evaluated could inadvertently increase segregation.

Teacher evaluations that are based on student test scores, for example,
could have unintended consequences, said Rucker C. Johnson, an associate
professor of public policy at the University of California, Berkeley.

Teachers would be reluctant to take assignments in high-poverty,
high-minority communities, he said. “And you’re going to be at risk of
being blamed for not increasing test scores as quickly as might be
experienced in a suburban, more affluent area,” Mr. Johnson said.

The report’s authors criticized the Obama administration as failing to
pursue integration policies, and argued that its support of charter
schools was helping create “the most segregated sector of schools for
black students.”

Daren Briscoe, a spokesman for the Department of Education, said the
Obama administration had taken “historic steps to transform the schools
that for too long have shortchanged the full potential of our young
people and have been unsuccessful in providing the necessary resources
and protections for students most at risk.”

Other advocates for minorities said charter schools had benefited their
communities, even if they were not racially integrated.

Raul Gonzalez, director of legislative affairs and education policy at
the National Council of La Raza, a Latino advocacy group, said that
black and Hispanic parents did not necessarily say “I want my kid to be
in an integrated setting.” Instead, he said, “they’re going to say I
want my kid’s school to do better than what it’s doing.”

Todd Ziebarth, vice president of the National Alliance of Public Charter Schools,
said he supported more money for transportation to charter schools and
encouraging them to pursue more diversity. But, he said, “if a school is
relatively homogeneous but is performing really well, we should be
celebrating that school, not denigrating it.”

Critics of segregation in traditional public schools and charters said
that there was more to education than pure academics.

“Is it possible to learn calculus in a segregated school? Of course it
is,” said Mark D. Rosenbaum, chief counsel to the American Civil
Liberties Union in Los Angeles. “Is it possible to learn how the world
operates and to think creatively about the rich diversity of cultures in
this country? It is impossible.”

This is really interesting and concurs with a lot of what we know about immigrant, Mexican mothers. I wonder though about the comparability of these mothers to those of other groups, i.e., white and Chinese. I would think that class was controlled for but this report doesn't say this explicitly. Will have to locate this study in the journal, Child Development.-Angela

According to a new study published Tuesday, Mexican immigrant mothers
performed better on some measures of parenting than white mothers did.

The study, conducted by a research team from the University of California, Berkeley, found that Mexican-origin
mothers provide "warm and supportive home settings," engage in fewer
conflicts with spouses and exhibit evidence of stronger mental health
than their white peers, despite higher poverty rates.

The study, published in the scientific journal Child Development, adds "nuance" to America's immigration debate, the research team noted in a press release.

Over a three-year period, from 2003 to 2006, researchers visited the
homes of and interviewed and observed 5,300 Mexican-born, Chinese-born
and white native-born mothers. Mexican-origin mothers were found to have
more than 20 percent fewer arguments with their spouses than their
white peers, and nearly 40 percent fewer arguments than peers of Chinese
heritage. Mexican immigrant mothers also had better results than their
white counterparts on an independent assessment of depressive symptoms.

On the other hand, Mexican mothers read to their children infrequently
and organized few educational activities that would advance
school-related skills, especially when compared with Chinese-immigrant
mothers. Mothers of Chinese origin performed better than the other two
groups on pre-literacy measures and worse on social ones.
“Until now, little national evidence has been available to
distinguish the home settings of major immigrant groups," said Claudia
Galindo, a professor of sociology at the University of Maryland and one
of the study authors. "And many policymakers have assumed that poverty
necessarily leads to poor parenting.”

The researchers looked at data from a nationally representative sample
of births drawn by the National Center for Education Statistics, a
research arm of the U.S. Department of Education. All children involved
in the survey were born in the United States in 2001.

Bruce Fuller, another author of the study, called the findings about Mexican mothers as a "surprise."

"Poverty is definitely a drag on the well-being of families, but at the
same time, at least for Mexican immigrants, they have cultural strengths
that buffer the negative effects of family," he said.

Some scholars and commentators have argued
that the differences between low-income Mexican families and families
from other low-income groups have to do with historical and economic
factors. Many Puerto Ricans settled in urban areas in the 50 and 60s,
just as the manufacturing sector, which had provided stable work to
generations of new immigrants, entered a long period of decline.

Other observers say that non-citizen immigrants, by necessity, tend to have more ambition and resourcefulness than most people.

"That has an impact on the formation of families, and how people relate
to families and your relationship to the labor market has a major impact
as well," said Angelo Falcón, the director of the National Institute
for Latino Policy.

These latest findings come amid much discussion by immigration scholars about the so-called "Latino Paradox"
-– the finding that Hispanic immigrants tend to be healthier than their
better-off, non-immigrant counterparts, despite the prevailing wisdom
that richer people are healthier.